THREE
PHYSICAL BRUISES HEAL. It’s the mental ones that can kill you. Bloom shook her head and hit the delete key. Looked for a more genteel way to get her point across. She didn’t want to lose her audience during the first minute of the two-hour-long psychology symposium. They’d given her a room with seating for three hundred, which could feel cavernous if she failed to entertain.
Back in her old life, her teaching life, she’d have filled the screen with visual aids, provided a handout—and probably pens, too. She’d have sent around a bowl filled with individually wrapped peppermints. All actions designed to increase memory retention in lecture situations, and she’d have been content to get 5 percent retention after seven days.
But those were the old days. Her associate college professor days. Funny how so much could change in just three years.
Physical bruises heal. It’s the mental ones that can kill you. Her second try ended up exactly the same as the first.
And if she started her keynote address at the psychiatric conference that way, people might not physically exit in droves, but she might lose her credibility.
One in four of the audience members—the current statistic for the number of the victims of domestic violence in the United States—might even take offense. Get angry.
How could she belittle the bruises that took so many lives? How could she say that “bruises heal,” dismissing the fact that intimate partners lifted fists to those who loved them?
She had two hours to impress upon her peers the very real disease that ate away at more of the population than any other disease. Domestic violence.
Medical personnel had been made more aware of intimate partner violence in recent years. After all, some professional sports leagues had been forced to shine light on the problem as a way of warding off the negative press that resulted from some of their stars being abusers.
But the fact that every minute twenty-four people were victims of intimate partner abuse in the United States was not just a problem for police and hospitals, doctors and nurses. Her profession—psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors—needed to step up to the plate.
Because bruises, broken bones, even cracked skulls healed over time. But without awareness, without help, without a “movement” to tend to the mental bruises left by domestic violence, not enough of the victims of that violence were going to heal...
The soapbox is not going to work with these people.
Bloom’s self-talk was trying to help. She knew that.
But...unhealed mental wounds often drove victims to the other side—they became abusers.
Preaching, teaching, prophesying or statisticizing wasn’t going to reach her peers.
She deleted again.
Sitting behind her mahogany desk, Bloom looked over the top of her laptop screen to survey her office, as though the words she needed were there. The couch and two recliners that faced each other with her favorite old claw-footed chair—an inheritance from the maternal
